Dwight York

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Dwight York built a full-scale Egyptian pyramid on a Georgia compound, declared himself an extraterrestrial, and was convicted in 2004 of molesting over 100 children — some as young as four years old.

In 1995, Casartelli's skull cracked on a roadside concrete block during stage 15; he was dead before the helicopter landed. The race continued. Miguel Induráin won overall in silence.

A sitting president joked, live on stage, that he should have 'gone first' before soldiers raped and killed Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill in 1989. The crowd laughed. He won the election anyway.

Britain's 'impregnable' Singapore fortress had fifteen-inch coastal guns pointed permanently seaward. Japan's 30,000 troops arrived on bicycles from the Malayan jungle to the north and accepted the surrender of 80,000 Allied soldiers.

Francisco Ferrer opened a Barcelona school in 1901 with no grades, no priests, no corporal punishment. Spain blamed him for a workers' uprising he didn't lead and executed him by firing squad in 1909.

Schiele painted children in explicit sexual poses, was jailed in 1912 — and the judge burned one drawing in open court as a torch, declaring it pornography. He was 22. The models were sometimes as young as 12.

Before electricity, a mesh sock soaked in radioactive thorium dioxide burned inside every middle-class parlour lamp. The mantles crumbled to radioactive dust when touched. Millions were sold; none came with warnings.

The Xoloitzcuintli — hairless, wrinkled, warm to the touch — was bred by Aztecs to escort dead souls through Mictlan's nine treacherous underworld levels. Owners were buried alongside them. The breed is over 3,500 years old.

Taken from Albania as a child hostage, raised as an Ottoman janissary, Skanderbeg defected at 38 with three hundred men and held off the full Ottoman army 25 times over 25 years.